Quartet

It's our AGM on Thursday, so time for the final film of the season.

We try to choose something that will bring in the punters so that they will renew their subscriptions for next year, and this time we've chosen Quartet: something that will fit our age demographic perfectly :-)

I've not seen it and am looking forward to it very much.  Here are my notes:

Quartet

UK 2012                      90 minutes

Director:                      Dustin Hoffman

Starring:                        Billy Connolly, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Pauline Collins, Sheridan Smith, Tom Courtenay

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for one Golden Globe (Maggie Smith as Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy)
• A further three wins and one nomination

“There’s a gentle, sugared honesty in Quartet about old age: it stops short of anything too testing or tragic.  This is a lot closer to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) than it is to Amour (2012), and the only final curtain here is made of heavy, red velvet.”

Robbie Collins

At Beecham House, a home for retired musicians, the annual concert to celebrate Verdi's birthday is disrupted by the arrival of Jean (Maggie Smith), an eternal diva and the former wife of celebrated tenor Reggie (Tom Courtenay) one of the residents.

 

The screenplay is by Ronald Harwood, who adapted it from his play of the same name with the particular members of the film’s cast in mind.  In recent years Harwood has written the screenplays for films as diverse as The Pianist (2002), Oliver Twist (2005) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) as well as working on the screenplay for Australia (2008) but before this he had a distinguished career as a playwright and novelist.  Initially he had intended to become an actor, and a fascination for the stage and its performers is a recurring theme in his work: in addition to Quartet he wrote both the original play and the screenplay for The Dresser (1983) (one of the best plays and films ever written about the theatre) which starred Tom Courtenay as the general assistant to an elderly actor, After The Lions, a play about the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and All the World’s a Stage, a general history of theatre.

The director of the film is Dustin Hoffman, making his debut as a director at the age of 75.  Hoffman received much critical acclaim for his work on the film.  As the late Roger Ebert noted:

“What’s ... evident is that he loves the stage, loves show business and has a heart full of affection for these elderly survivors.  He also loves his location, here called Beecham House, and scenes are bridged with many shots of the elegantly landscaped grounds.”

After an award-winning career on stage and in film which has included, amongst many other nominations and awards, two Best Actor Oscars and three BAFTAs for Best Actor, in 2013 Hoffman won the Breakthrough Directing Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Here's the trailer:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)

France 2007 (112 minutes)
Director: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigneur, Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Cosigny and Max von Sydow

Awards and Nominations

* Nominated for four Oscars including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood)
* Won BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay
* Won Best Director (Julian Schnabel) at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Palme d’Or
* A further 39 nominations and 32 nominations

In 1995 Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, suffered a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome. He was paralysed apart from some movement in his head and eyes, and his sole method of communication was by blinking his left eye. With the help of transcribers who repeated the alphabet to him until he blinked at the selected letter, over a period of 10 months Bauby dictated a memoir of his life - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby eventually completed his book and it was published to critical acclaim; shortly after its publication Bauby died of pneumonia.

The film was originally to be made in English with Schnabel as director working from Ronald Harwood’s screenplay and with Johnny Depp as Bauby. Depp withdrew from the film because of scheduling conflicts with other projects and Pathé took over as producer. According to Ronald Harwood Pathé wanted to make the movie in both English and French and that this is why bi-lingual actors were cast although everyone secretly knew that two versions would be impossibly expensive and that Schnabel had decided that it should be made in French – even going so far as to learn French in order to make the film.

Julian Schnabel made his name as an artist and after participating as the Venice Biennale in 1980 subsequently became a major figure in the Neo-expressionism movement before moving into film making. He insists that he is essentially a painter, although now he is better known for his films:

“Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.”

Both of Schnabel’s earlier films were concerned with artists: Basquiat (1996) is a biopic of the painter Jean-Michael Basquiat and Before Night Falls (2000) is based on the autobiographical novel by Reinaldo Arenas. Schnabel has subsequently directed a documentary film of a live concert by Lou Reed in New York as part of his Berlin tour, which Schnabel also designed.